drones

The recent drone strike in Pakistan’s northwest has eliminated an enemy of the state and his close associates. Hakimullah Mehsud’s death in North Waziristan has shaken the loose alliance of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). In any other country, the security policy managers would have capitalized such an opportunity. Not in Pakistan. In fact the reaction from the political parties, which had recently vowed to hold talks with TTP to secure peace, are alarming to say the least. Despite the great urge of politicians to hold talks, there were murmurs that the military may not be too excited about this development even though the COAS Gen Kayani gave his public assent saying that the army was following the political consensus. A PTI leader recently posted on social media that there was only a 40% chance of success for a military operation. However, the party stalwarts on social media later refuted this claim.

Independent security experts and political commentators have been highlighting that the simplistic, populist solution of ‘talks-will-lead-to-peace’ was designed to fail. Whom would the government negotiate with? What would be the conditions? Would the TTP end its terror attacks against Pakistani state and its citizens? All of these questions were unanswered. Yet, Hakimullah’s death has invited a barrage of reactions from politicians and right wing media that the latest drone strikes were a ‘murder of peace’. […]

A journalist recently remarked that 2011 was the year that no one will remember. Alas, this will not be the case, as the year will haunt us for some time to come. The process of forgetting will not be effortless. Pakistan has undergone several such moments in the past. However, 2011 brought it all together in a chaotic fashion, exposing the blood-lined fissures within the society and the long-term crumbling of the state.

The year started with the gruesome murder of Salmaan Taseer, governor of Pakistan’s largest province as he championed the cause of a poor woman booked under the blasphemy law. His death was a shocking event in multiple ways: the murderer Mumtaz Qadri was a man supposed to protect him, the killer was garlanded and elevated to the status of a hero by many segments of the society especially the clerics. A tragedy of this proportion at one level appeared to be an epitaph of a society that had buried its humanity. Even worse the political parties, civil society and media remained cautious in the aftermath of the assassination; and the hope for a collective resistance was missing.

It took several months for an afraid judge to deliver a verdict against this heinous act and now the judge lives outside Pakistan to escape the wrath of clerics who find his act of sentencing Qadri abominable. The executive did little to punish errant officials who had allowed for things to come to such a pass; and the Parliament could not even offer prayers for the slain governor. Pakistan has never appeared so unkind and insensitive to murder, and that too in the name of a faith that preaches peace. This murder was followed by the assassination of Pakistan’s minorities minister Shahbaz Bhatti ostensibly at the hands of Taliban and to date the killers remain at large. Bhatti’s death marked the end of activism against the Blasphemy law silencing most of the voices calling for reform to the man-made laws which persecutes both Muslims and non-Muslims in Pakistan.

Bruised by this ghastly incident, the country displayed another kind of a collective neurosis when a trigger-happy CIA contractor Raymond Davis killed three Pakistanis in Lahore. Davis’ act was despicable and he ought to have been punished. But Pakistan’s right wing and media manifested a rare kind of blood thirst against this operative of a notorious agency. The calls to hang Davis without a due examination of international and domestic laws came as another affirmation of a society, which has abandoned rule of law in favour of chaos and paranoia. It is a separate matter that the state bailed out Davis applying the Islamic laws introduced by Gen Zia ul Haq by paying blood money to the families of the victims. The executive was in overdrive and the judiciary also delivered a speedy judgement. The incident left Pakistanis more xenophobic and resentful of its long-time patron and ally, the United States.

Nothing has been more turbulent than the trajectory of Pak-US relations during the year. The two allies turned into frenemies by the end of the year. The Davis saga set the stage for stranger things to come.

On May 2, a special team of US Navy seals almost invaded a part of Pakistan in a surgical strike to capture and kill the leader of Al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden (OBL). The location of OBL’s hideout was most embarrassing. The chief patron of a global Islamist movement was living apparently for years near a garrison town in Abbottabad, close to a prestigious military training academy.

There was uproar in Pakistan and the earlier shock and unanswered question – what was OBL doing there –was replaced by a nationalist outrage. The US had violated our sovereignty and if our security forces were negligent or complicit there was an issue. The contradictions within Pakistan’s policy and its domestic civil-military relations were at once laid bare under international spotlight.

The domestic crisis which emanated out the May 2 strike on OBL’s hideout deepened by the end of the year when the civilian and military power-wielders were playing out their conflict in the courts. The memo-gate affair, as it is now known, finds its roots in the writing of an unsigned memo allegedly written by Pakistan’s Ambassador to the US calling for US intervention and support for the attempts to establish civilian control of security and foreign policies. By the end of the year, the Ambassador had resigned, faced a court petition, which culminated in the formation of a judicial commission to probe the charges, and been placed in virtual imprisonment beacause of fears for his safety.

Between these events, there were two other acts of violence. One against the state by a well-planned attack on a major naval base in Karachi in May 2011, and the second, the abduction and murder of a journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad around end of May 2011. Both acts disparate in their intensity and nature underlined one thing in common: the power of militant groups, a reality to be reckoned with. The naval base attack by the militants (or non state actors) apparently had inside support while the slain journalist was reporting regularly on the activities of extremist non-state actors as well as the operations of Al Qaeda in Pakistan.

These organised groups also abducted the son of the late Salmaan Taseer from Lahore and an American aid worker Warren Weinstein in August. On the issue of latter, a video was released by the current Al Qaeda chief claiming that his network had the American citizen in their custody. For the release of Weinstein, Pakistan and the US have to meet several demands of the militants. […]